Re: [gcmd-dev] Gnome Commander version 1.12.3.1 released

[Uwe Scholz]

Hiho Stefan,

Am Sun, 28 Nov 2021 12:58:22 +0100 schrieb Stefan Czinczoll:
>
> Hi Uwe,
>
> on 22.11.21 at 22:06 you wrote:
>
> > Volunteers are welcome! ^_^.
>
> I'd like to assist, but I'm really not good at programming. About 10
> years ago I had learned C# and now I'm going through C++ tutorials.

Well, Piotr once started to migrate Gnome Commander from C to C++. This
project was never really finished and at the moment the sources are
still a lot of C and only here and there you find real C++ code. For
example, quite often you will find pointers and C-style casts. I
personally also add more C than C++ into the sources at the moment.

> Is there a header and or sourcecode file you'd suggest to begin with?

Hm, not a specific one. If you're just starting from scratch I would
first setup an IDE so that you can easily step through the source code
when debugging. This makes your life really easy when trying to
understand a certain part of Gcmd. For example, when starting the
program, the stored user settings are loaded in the method
"GnomeCmdData::load()" in src/gnome-cmd-data.cc which itself is called
in main.cc. You could try to set a breakpoint in the mentioned method,
just to get things going and see what's happening there. Just as a
starter.

If this is done and you feel ready to start, you could pick an open
issue from the issue list and try to see which parts of the sources are
involved. If you don't feel confident I would propose not to pick one from the
1.14.0 milestone list as I might finish these issues in the not so far
future (hopefully). There is also a TODO file with open things, maybe
the shortcut section might need to be revised:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-commander/-/blob/master/TODO#L56-74

Personally, I have a wish already, but I did not find the time to work
on it yet. It would be great if we could implement unit tests with
GLib https://docs.gtk.org/glib/testing.html. At the moment, we are
using Googles GTest library for which I have written 8 unit tests (all
for the internal viewer only) in the past. But I would like to move
away from that Google library and use the gtk framework instead. By the
way, the tests are run by "make test".

I hope this gives you an idea how to start. ^_^

Ciao
Uwe